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Friday, December 3, 2010

Alpha 5.1 - Of Murder And Trust

Major new concepts and features for 5.1. Should be renamed 6.0 honestly, didn't thought I would go this fast.Murder, murderers, law enforcers and follower trust.
Let the annotated screenies tell the story.

Law enforcers have a chance to recognize an actor as a murderer when they see him.
There are various factors, all explained in the release.
They can also spot actors committing a murder.

Will he stop shouting like that!!

My mate is helping of course. We are now partners in crime.
Right after getting rid of the cop I open the door...

Will all this hate around me never ends? :(

I drop some food for him to avoid more troubles.

There. Good dog.

New features = new skills, so here they are.

Watch out folks. You can get murdered too, most likely by a starving mad civilian in your sleep. I wonder if a follower guarding you would help...
And yes, you can DISABLE the angry hungry civilian thing, it's an option on by default.

39 comments:

The "trust" system is great. It always felt unnatural for me that anyone follows you at once. Also the "internet police" is a bit weird, but still acceptable (let's just imagine that the cops in the Racoon City are extremely good psychologists and notice any man who is a murderer, hehe).

Also it gives roles to the "police" profession, making it more distinct and interesting. I really love it.

When I started playing Rogue Survivor at Alpha 5's release, this feature was pretty much exactly what I felt like the game needed the most. It's pretty sweet that it's going to be the next addition. :D

All we need now is gangsters to stop always wasting bullets on my poor, starving self and I might just shed tears of joy.

Here's an idea to improve the trust situation:Make medical items function like spray paint does, except instead of targeting tiles, it targets NPCs.NPCs that get healed by you improve their trust based on how much healing the item does, how much they were actually healed (they shouldn't like to waste medicine) and wether or not you have a medical skill to apply to that used item, and how high that skill is.

The same goes for scent killer; spraying an ally with scent killer when they are not under the effects of it can improve their trust towards you, especially if they saw a zombie capable of smell lately. (they'd love getting scent killer more if they'd seen a zombie master, then they would if they'd seen a skeleton)

Awesome. Just awesome. By the way, what do you think about hiding the trust real value from player and replacing it with verbal description? Like "suspicious", "trusting" and so on. And NPC with max trust level could be "a friend" :)

Also, talking about cops, will they defend their property in future builds? Because now it's really easy to get into Police station, grab shotgun, ammo, all other kinds of stuff and just go away. After that the game become much more easier, so I think this moment needs some balancing.

This means that someday we can have a fully functioning city system in place before a zombie invasion, rather then.... You awaken at XXX, suddenly..EVERY CAR IN THE CITY EXPLODES/MALFUNCTIONS, zombies everywhere! City life devolves into instant chaos!

Meaning we could potentially have a few days before the zombie invasion, maybe actually owning a home and the like, being able to buy things before the sudden invasion, or working in a job and the like and being in a profession before things happen. (You are the cop, SAVE THE CITY!)

Some stuff that has been on my mind since the release of reincarnations:will future releases enable us to actally start out as a policeman, with duties/obligations (such as protecting potential victims or following orders from superiors) accompanied by some benefits unattainable by civilians (extra health, protection or skill / authority to order around civilians)? will ther be policewimmins?

Also, will civilians gain the ability to move towards a previously observed supply drop point in need of food? probably also running into "Those guys" like the player?

@mono : tried to port to mono this week. bunch of stupid exceptions and errors eg: "not implemented" when serializing, data files are not compatible(wtf?) etc... i don't want to have to rewrite a bunch of code that may or may not work on linux. plus mono iirc performance is awful vs .net.

@preparation days before invasion: no. your character is not supposed to know this will happen and prepare himself. i don't want this.

@more complex pc : maybe.

@civs ai go to drop points/events spots : maybe. keep in mind that means a proper pathfinding = 100+ civs ai eats your cpu. part of the fun is also you are clever than stupid ais.

@insta trust no.

@recruit jm : probably not.

@internet police : rationalization = they get notified of murderers description by radio or whatever. just a gameplay thing. more realistic complex stuff might come later.

I think the charismatic trait should come with some kind of added benefit in addition to the +1 trust. If you don't have any leadership skill, isn't it completely useless? Maybe it could influence trading ability as well?

It's a simplification. I could make a more "realistic" system (like NPcs telling each other who they saw murdering who, so you could murder witnesses to cover your crimes etc...) but this is just not worth it : too much CPU spent (read: slower turns) and and data allocated (read: longer loading times) for something the vast majority of players would not notice or care about anyway. Its technically pretty easy to do, just not worth it.

@Roguedjack "@civs ai go to drop points/events spots : maybe. keep in mind that means a proper pathfinding = 100+ civs ai eats your cpu. part of the fun is also you are clever than stupid ais."

Currently I hardly ever see NPCs other than soldiers and CHAR guards survive more than a couple of days. I would imagine the leading causes of death are starvation (frequently for civs & cops, doubly so for for gangs), being ambushed in their sleep, and being chased down while in a hungry, sleep-deprived state. This is with relevant options at default expect for simulation at 100% and district size at maximum... The district size is probably a significant factor, as people are then more likely to not stumble upon the supply drops as they wander around.

If NPCs could proactively seek out supply drops, and consequently not starve or stumble around in hunger-induced sleep-deprivation as much, that could improve their survival rate a great deal. If the NPCs you encounter live longer rather than almost all being fresh refugees, that makes all the interaction features that are being implemented more interesting from a gameplay standpoint. And supply drop locations could serve as focus points - everyone wants that food, so it's a great opportunity to recruit, trade or skirmish with other survivors, the gangs will want their piece too, then the zombies will wander in tracking everyone's scents, etc. Basically it could add a new kind of dynamism to the game world.

@kurik Again, it costs cpu to implement these kind of things. The more complex the ai behavior, the more cpu needed for it, the slower the game.Believe me, the game would crawl as hell.RTS and FPS can do things like this because you don't really notice the lag, it will just skip frames and display at a lower FPS. In a turn based game where all the ai processing has to happen at the same time between turns, you feel the lag. You can't skip frames.I could, perhaps, try to introduce something like this, but carefully and optimized and simplified.

Well, you'll have to be final judge on the feasibility of the implementation, but if you can figure out a way to do something like this without it being a bottomless CPU sink, I encourage you to go for it - it would be an elegant way to get more mileage out of the interaction features you're currently implementing, and it would be interesting to have a sort of an "ecology" happening in the game world. :)

The new features will be awesome, i don't see why there are complains above, also if JM can join us i hope we have to kill a lot of people first because i don't see why a psycho murderer beast like JM would join us ?! i also hope he can kill us in our sleep lol

@anon 9:28pmThinking on player time would be a false good idea imho, as the player acting changes the world and would make AI "pre-thinking" likely obsolete.Eg: the player is thinking, the AI think at the same time and wants to open a door, the player then plays and open this door, hence AI thinking was rendered useless when it is is turn to act. worse if other AIs have precedence in acting over this one.

This kind of thing works in Chess AI for various reason (I did one, its called "thinking on opponent time" and works because you can somewhat "predict" actions) but not here imho.

about multi-threading, I'm pretty sure this would be useless in a sequential game like this when stuff has to happen in a predefined and strict order, so you gain no time by doing things in seperate thread as there can be really only one thread.

In RS there is no distinction between the player and NPCs. They are all actors. The only difference is their controller (player or AI). All the map is "simulated" at the same level of detail.I know some roguelikes make big distinctions between the player and NPCs ("mobs", "monsters", whatever), RS does not.So the area around the player is nothing special and is no more "active" or "detailled" that other parts of the map.

I understand the AI thread idea, it could work great in games that are player-centric and/or do a lot of pathfinding on a static world.

@AsesinoTrust is only between a follower and his leader.AI leaders don't give orders yet so by extension the trust value is not used, but it is there and tracked by the game and don't slow the game at all.I might make some leaders AI in later version give orders, like NatGuards sergeants. I just have to write the AI for it but you are correct this would be resource hungry if I want the leader to be not too retarded.